Friday, November 4, 2016

Parashat Noach: Water is Life

Shabbat Shalom. This week’s Torah portion
is Parashat Noach, arguably the most well-known story of our Torah. It is one
of the earliest Bible stories I ever learned, and most children, regardless of
religious affiliation can at least tell you the information they learned from
the song “Rise and Shine”. In it, we learn that water is destruction. God uses
a flood to wipe out all of humanity because people have become too corrupt.
Afterwards, God sends a rainbow as a promise that God will never again destroy
the world. Similarly, in this week’s haftarah from Isaiah, God promises that
once the Jewish people repent and are returned from Exile, God will never again
punish the Jewish people. It’s all very well and good for God to promise to
never again destroy the world or harm the Jewish people, but now it’s up to
humanity to ensure we don’t destroy ourselves, starting with caring for our
natural world.

According
to Rabbi Eliezer, a great Rabbi from around the first or second century, this
event happened exactly at this time of year in which we read the story, shortly
after the festival of Shemini Atzeret and the beginning of the hopefully rainy
season in Israel. Rashi, a much more recent rabbi from only about one thousand
years ago, continues on in this fashion, saying that when God first sent the
waters down, God hoped that the threat of the flood would have been enough to
encourage the people to repent, and then the rains would be rains of blessing,
need at this time of year to keep the earth in ecological balance. When the
people continued to cause violence amongst themselves, the rains continued and
turned from blessing to curse, from a life force that allows the earth to
flourish to a great flood that destroyed everything. Because though water is
the tool of death and destruction in this story, and certainly can still be to
this day with hurricanes and tsunamis and the like, water is really a source of
life. Without water, nothing grows, no one survives, and the earth withers and
dies. Water is life.

In
college I studied some of the violence that can live alongside water disputes.
There are places in the world were water is scarce, and it becomes a resource
worth fighting over, causing water wars which some sociologists and
environmentalists I studied at the time believed would be the cause of the next
global war. These places and conflicts were the bulk and main focus of my
studies, but I also read up on cases where a water source was itself used as a
weapon of colonialism and capitalism. I could name a handful of those
situations from different countries on multiple continents in which governments
approve big building projects that destroy indigenous communities and entire
eco-systems. Sometimes they are municipal projects, like building a dam that
will flood out an entire population of an indigenous tribe and annihilate the
habitats of countless animals in order to create power for a city expanding
beyond its capacity. Sometimes they are business projects that oil companies,
real estate developers, and the like pay for and coerce politicians into
approving, at the cost of the people who actually live in the area being sold
off to big businesses that will come in and build and leave, with no regard to
the aftermath of such devastation and displacement.

Of course, a current situation as well known as the Noah story, at
least now while it’s in the public eye, is the dispute over the Dakota Access Pipeline.
As you may know, a pipeline has been approved for an oil company based out of
Texas to build through Native American land. There are many aspects to the
situation that are deeply problematic, but the most looming and easily
relatable one for all people regardless of geographic location or national
identity is the issue of ecological damage and water pollution that the
pipeline is sure to cause. With climate change reaching a peak that scientists
are now saying is irreversible, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan still
unaddressed, and clean energy initiatives coming along painstakingly slowly, do
we as an entire human race really want to risk building a new pipeline for oil
know the pollution that burning oil causes? Do we really want to raze
ecosystems and develop new harmful structures on protected land? Do we really
want to risk poisoning yet another water source and decimating yet another
community? I just can’t see any way in which that honors the covenant with God
represented in the rainbow of this week’s parasha. God has promised to never
again destroy the earth with water. I’d suggest that promising to stop
destroying each other’s water sources the least we can do to uphold our end of
the bargain, to care better for all of God’s creation.

May we learn from the indigenous people of this country to protect
our water and our earth, for water is life. I’d like to close by sharing a poem
I found online by a Mohawk woman.

Water,
She possess
the specific rhythm
of a poet
Close to grace
given to cumulus clouding of frenzy
Perhaps she is as subtle as a late night bloomer
A desert cacti
A winged bird of prey
Feeding on the smallest of creatures
Nesting in the hearts of men
of boys
of beginnings
Our Water,
She is of the earth
It can be said
But,
It is the silk of sky she wears best
Riding the rainbows of the moon
The most delicate of hues washing her shadows
All the shades of white to marble her weightless flight
The whirlpool of her
digressions
mapping veins
blue as,
High noon July Sky
against
A northern river
Wide and deep as frozen yesterday
Our Water is Life,
She paints the horizon
We set sail
against
The four winds gathering nations
To carve
backward the motion of time
a feast of all memory
Her power
essential and sublime
Blessed is all of God’s creation, the water and the earth and the rains.
Amen and Shabbat Shalom.